‘It is all “those things” that make a grand mariage. If you think you do not care now, you will care in a year’s time. Mamma said so. Mamma said you will be just like anybody else when you shall have been in the world six months.’
Yseulte shook her head with a smile, but she sighed a little also; it pained her that the world, and all it gave, was so intermingled with this beautiful, incredible, dream-like joy which had come to her like some vision brought by angels. In the singleness and sincerity of her young heart she thought: ‘Ah! if only he were poor!—how I wish he were poor!—then they would know and he!——’
But he was not poor, and he had sent her pearls worthy of an empress, and Blanchette was dancing before her in envy, longing to be sixteen years old too and betrothed to an archi-millionaire.
She cast one last timid glance at herself and at the great pearls lying beneath the slender ivory column of her throat, then she drew on her long gloves, and went, with a quickly-beating heart, down the staircase, Blanchette shouting after her Judic’s song,—
On ne peut pas savoir ce que c’est,
Ce que c’est,
Si on n’a pas passé par là!
which the child had caught up from the echoes of the boulevards, and sang with as much by-play and meaning as Judic herself could have put into it.
There were some twenty people assembled in the oval drawing-room when Yseulte entered it. It was not of them she was afraid: it was of seeing Othmar before them. There was a murmur of admiration as she appeared in her childish white dress, with the superb necklace on, which a queen might have worn at a Court ball. Her shyness did not impair her grace; the stateliness and pride which were in her blood gave her composure even in her timidity; her eyes were dark and soft with conflicting feelings, her colour came and went. She never spoke audibly once in answer to all the compliment and felicitation she received, but she looked so lovely and so young that no one quarrelled with her silence. When Othmar gave her his arm she trembled from head to foot, but no one noticed it save Othmar himself.
‘Do not be afraid of me, my child,’ he murmured, and for the first time she took courage and looked at him with a rapid glance that was like a beam of sunlight. The look said to him, ‘I am not afraid, I am grateful; I love you, only I dare not say so, and I hardly understand what has happened.’